Best filenames for pages?

**Frostie** · 01-09-06

I have a question regarding the filenames of pages and wondered what others thought or their experiences when it comes to SEO.

Say for example I wanted to promote Marks & Spencer, and have a dedicated webpage for them. The options of nameing the page I can think of are;

markspencer.php
marksspencer.php
mark-spencer.php
mands.php
marks spencer.php (converts the space to a %20)

If you were creating a page like this, what naming convention would you choose?

**Nosmo_King** · 01-09-06

I always seperate keywords. Search engines see - as a space

In this case I would try joining the marks spencer with &

**Supercod** · 01-09-06

Would have done marks-and-spencer.php if it was my choice, however how right or wrong that is I can't 100% say but works ok for me.

**Brendon** · 01-09-06

Use marksspencer.php. SEs are pretty good at stemming these days. Definitely DON'T use the space or &amp versions - madness lies that way

If you want to separate keywords for user experience etc, you can use a - or _, it doesn't matter much which you use

**accelerator** · 01-09-06

When I looked at this a while back, consensus seemed to be dash separated keywords, i.e.

keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.php

This is what I use.

Rgds

Accelerator

**Nosmo_King** · 01-09-06

Originally Posted by Brendon

Use marksspencer.php. SEs are pretty good at stemming these days. Definitely DON'T use the space or &amp versions - madness lies that way

I'm always keen to learn. Why would & be madness?

**Frostie** · 01-09-06

Would & cause possible problem when it comes to variables? I know using & does so I am presuming & may have the same effect.

**Brendon** · 01-09-06

Frostie basically got it - you have to think about the difference between server and client side stuff....

Actual page filenames are a server side thing, and servers interpret any "&" character as the beginning of a parameter / value pair for the server to process, NOT as an HTML entity for the browser to render, which is the effect I think you were aiming for.

In this case "&" would be interpreted as a malformed p / v pair called "amp;", which has been truncated somehow - this might actually affect crawling behaviour, since you may trip the "dynamic page" flag, and that can cause problems, especially if the "dynamic" element looks malformed....

Similiarly the space version would cause potential problems, since webservers can't handle URLs containing spaces (it's not a valid URL character either), they get translated to the %20 entity, as Frostie noted earlier, and look a right gimp in the SERPs, although it may not have much effect on rankings etc, but it does look a bit odd when users see it, and may well bring your CTR down

**ash** · 01-09-06

I always use a - to seperate keywords.

I also use suitable subfolder titles on larger sites, so if i had a large section for marks and spencers, i'd probably use /marks-and-spencer/keyword.php

**hawkwind dave** · 21-09-06

it doesn't matter whether you use marksandspencer, marks-and-spencer, or marks_and_spencer. Or even marks-spencer, or marksspencer, as the search engines always ignore words such as 'and'.

The search engines are more than capable of pulling keywords out of a string of words, such as keywordkeywordkeyword. So there's no need to separate them.

**Fraser** · 21-09-06

I think it does matter and you would be better off using hyphens. I suppose I can't prove the point but it seems more readable to me and Matt Cutts recommends it too

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/